I was at a catechism class the other night, and the priest teaching highlighted this point about those lost in sins of sodomy or of Gomorrah: deep down, they know what they do is profoundly wrong, incredibly disordered, offensive to God, and all the rest. I have written similarly in the past, much of the cultural onslaught in favor of the perverse is about their always present need for affirmation. That affirmation serves to quell those pangs of conscience that afflict the souls lost in these sins... But it is never enough. That is why this homosexual advocacy will be the vehicle of the coming persecution, there is a tendency among these folks to need not just continual, fawning affirmation, but a need to utterly crush any opposition that could serve as a reminder of their sin.

Friday, December 20, 2013

Roger Waters is the co-founder of the rock band Pink Floyd, whose music album "Another Brick in the Wall (Part II)" topped the Billboard chart in the U.S. for fifteen weeks. "The Wall" ranks number three on the Recording Industry Association of America's list of the all-time Top 100 albums, with 23 million certified units sold in the U.S.

Waters: "I have nearly finished Max Blumenthal’s book Goliath: Life and Loathing in greater Israel. It’s a chilling read. It’s extremely well written in my view. He is a very good journalist and takes great pains to make sure that what he writes is correct. He also gives a voice to the other side. The voice, for instance, of the right wing rabbinate, which is so bizarre and hard to hear that you can hardly believe that it’s real. They believe some very weird stuff you know, they believe that everybody that is not a Jew is only on earth to serve them and they believe that the indigenous people of the region that they kicked off the land in 1948 and have continued to kick off the land ever since are sub-human. The parallels with what went on in the 30’s in Germany are so crushingly obvious...

"...where I live, in the USA...the propaganda machine that starts in Israeli schools and that continues through all the Netanyahu’s bluster is poured all over the United States, not just Fox but also CNN and in fact in all the mainstream media. It’s like a huge bucket of crap that they are pouring into the mouth of a gullible public in my view, when they say 'we are afraid of Iran, it is going to get nuclear weapons…'. It’s a diversionary tactic....no Israeli government has been serious about creating a Palestinian state since 1948. They’ve always had the Ben Gurion agenda of kicking all the Arabs out of the country and becoming greater Israel. They tell a lie as part of their propaganda machinery..This has been a very hard sell particularly where I live in the United States of America. The Jewish lobby is extraordinary powerful here and particularly in the industry that I work in, the music industry and in rock’n roll as they say. I promise you, naming no names, I’ve spoken to people who are terrified...if they stand shoulder to shoulder with me..."

Michael Hoffman’s Afterword

We are witnessing momentous change in the anti-Zionist Left which used to believe the legend that Israeli Zionism was a violation of the religion of Orthodox Judaism’s ethics. Now writers like Max Blumental and observers such as musician Roger Waters perceive that “right wing (i.e. Talmudic) rabbis" are behind the violence against the Palestinians and the land grab, justifying it on the basis of rabbinic texts such as the Mishnah Berurah, Shulchan Aruch, and of course the Gemara (Talmud).

This does not signify that every accusation of Judaic ritual murder is not true, a claim refuted by Prof. Ariel Toaff in his book "Blood Passover," before he was forced to recant his thesis due to threats to his academic career and even his freedom.

II. Borrow a copy of today's Wall Street Journal and turn to page A15 in the first section and read the editorial column, "A Prelude to Murder: Calling Humans Vermin.”

Susan Benesch, founder and director of the “Dangerous Speech Project"

In the column, Susan Benesch, a fellow of the US Holocaust Museum (she founded something called the “Dangerous Speech Project”), and her co-author Michael Abrahamowitz (a US Holocaust Museum director), offer as examples of hate speech-purveyors, Nazis, Buddhists, Greek Rightists, and Iranians who refer to Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu as a "rabid dog.”

Benesch and Abrahamowitz have not a word to say about influential rabbis such as Ovadia Yosef who declare their desire to annihilate the Arab people and subjugate the goyim. Benesch and Abrahamowitz give the impression that hate is being spewed by one broadly caricatured class of miscreants tracked and exposed by high-minded Judaic persons who are morally positioned to judge the offenders -- and exempt the rabbis.

Tuesday, December 17, 2013

Alfred Rosenberg joined the Nazis before Adolf Hitler did. He later served as the party’s interim leader. He wrote a virulent, best-selling book about the “Aryan” struggle against Jews.

...On Tuesday the Nazi theorist’s 425-page, handwritten diary, which vanished after the war, was transferred by federal authorities to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, which had been searching for it for years.
...Rosenberg was tried as a war criminal and hanged in 1946. He was 53. Scholars had been eager to see what this longtime Nazi from Hitler’s inner circle had to say in the missing journal. But details of the Nazis’ grand plans for genocide and brutal domination are absent from the pages.
“Rosenberg obsessed a lot about the Jews — just not in his diary,” said Jurgen Matthaus, director of applied research at the museum’s Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies.
“He saw no reason to elaborate on fundamental Nazi goals, as he regarded them as self-evident,” Matthaus said at the museum transfer ceremony.
..."If you are looking for shattering revelations about the Nazi era, you’re not going to find them,” he said. “His diary often seems muted, if not silent, on crucial topics and important events, including the persecution of Jews,” Matthaus said.
“There’s a lot of surprising material,” he said, but “this is not the smoking gun. This is not the silver bullet.....”

Michael Hoffman's Afterword:68 years after the end of World War II and still no proof of the gas chamber execution claims, just a lot of mind-reading by pompous true-believers such as Jurgen Matthaus, possessed of some sort of omniscience that has been denied lesser mortals. We’re dealing with a religious fanatic here, not a historian. A historian would react with surprise at the lack of "genocide and brutal domination” in this private diary and do further investigating. The religious fanatic reaffirms a dogma in the presence of missing evidence.

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Wednesday, December 11, 2013

From a review of the book After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation (2009) by Giles MacDonogh:

"This absorbing study of the Allied occupation of Germany and Austria from 1945 to 1949 shows that the end of WWII by no means ended the suffering. A vengeful Red Army visited on German women an ordeal of mass rape, while looting the Soviet occupation zone of almost everything of value, from watches to factories. Millions of ethnic Germans were driven from Poland and Czechoslovakia, stripped of their possessions and subjected to atrocities on the way...Nor were the Germans, with their own death camps finally coming to the world's appalled attention, in a good position to complain...”

--Publisher's Weekly

If the foregoing reasoning is valid, why were Judaics and Zionists "in a good position to complain" about the so-called "Holocaust," since it occurred in the wake of the Judeo-Bolshevik instigated deaths of millions of Christian gentiles in the Soviet Union?

Fortunately Publisher's Weekly is wrong. The civilians of a population captive to Nazi or Soviet dictatorship are not collectivly responsible or guilty of any crime and their murders cannot be justified by any civilized criteria.

Nonetheless, the mass murder of German civilians during and immediately after World War II is often justified by the claim that these women, children and elderly men were collectively guilty and deserved to be killed, yet few would dare to apply this same standard to millions of Judaic persons in Eastern Europe and Russia who were ruled by or allied with the Judaic Bolsheviks who slaughtered gentiles, which led to a desire for reprisal on the part of the Germans. The Judaic complaining about this German reprisal has never ceased, and the complaintants appear to be in a very "good position" indeed. Why the double standard?

For further reading:

Princeton University Prof. Arno Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? (Pantheon, 1988)

How our enemies despise the world that Norman Rockwell conveyed! In particular the innocence, the family values and the gay old times (before that word was ruined in our time).

We are grateful for the many hours of time-traveling marvels which Mr. Rockwell has afforded us – peering into the window of America's past, when the innocence of children was closely guarded; the machine had not yet devoured our taste, sensibility and proportion; and the permanent Communist revolution which grinds slower under the Republicans and faster under the Democrats – but grinds all the same – was not yet marching so inexorably on behalf of "change," our nation's great god. One Christmas in the mid-1990s we wrote a short story for the season inspired by the Rockwell magazine cover "Shuffleton's Barbershop."

In November 2013, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published a book, American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell, by the racist anti-goyimite Deborah Solomon, whose hideous libels against gentile artist Rockwell are monstrous to behold. Solomon, who usually wields her poison pen for the New York Times, has a filthy mind, and with her Freudian (or should we say Fraudian) perspective, she claims to have detected a pattern of pedophilia in Rockwell’s nostalgic depictions of boys at play in fields and streams and ponds; on baseball diamonds and football fields; and oh yes, in a physician’s office. In Mr. Rockwell’s beloved scenes of American boyhood, Deborah Solomon believes she has caught a dirty old man, leering and drooling over them. “Solomon is always alert to possible homoerotic themes in Rockwell’s work” (Christopher Benfey).

Solomon puts forth her scurrilous allegations on zero evidence. There is no letter, diary or document of any kind to support her perverted libel. How then can Solomon be so unfair?

In the canonical rabbinic texts that determine the laws which Judaics are to scrupulously obey and observe, the principles of fairness only apply between Judaic persons. “Gentiles do not necessarily respect these principles and, hence, there is no obligation to show them such consideration in return” [Rabbi Ezra Basri, Chief Justice of the District Court of Jerusalem, Ethics of Business (Haktav Press), vol. 2, chapter 13].

Imputations of the inherent moral turpitude of gentiles is a dogma of Orthodox Judaism. The gentile is always suspect (Kitzur Shulchan Aruch 167:15), even when he tries to do good. Rabbi Eliezer Shach was described by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz as “the ultimate authority in the ultra-Orthodox world in Israel for the past quarter of a century.” Rabbi Shach stated in Michtavim uMaamarim, vol. 1: “Regarding this non-Jew, today he shows you a smiling face for some political consideration and within his heart he lays plots...The voice is the voice of Yaakov (Jacob) and the hands are the hands of Eisav (Esau).”

All gentiles have the status of Esau in the recondite teachings of the rabbis of Orthodox Judaism. They are all suspected of robbery (according to Maimonides, cf. Shulchan Aruch, Choshen Mishpat 369:6), and murder (Kitzur Shulchan Aruch 168:17).

Norman Rockwell, by offering to the world a picture of American gentile life in the 20th century suffused with goodness and decency, could not be allowed to continue to enjoy an unsullied reputation. He had to be dragged down into the primeval mud, into the stench and decay where all gentiles are consigned.

Is Deborah Solomon a close student of dogmatic rabbinic texts? Probably not. Is she a product of the culture distilled from that protozoic slime? It would seem so in the case of a benign artist undefiled during his lifetime by the degeneracy nowadays promoted from the White House to the dog house that is our media-driven milieu, and who Solomon felt impelled to defame and reduce to a figure of revulsion.

Prof. Patrick Toner of Wake Forest University has done yeoman work deconstructing Solomon’s libel. We urge you to read “False Portrait," his critique of her book. It can be accessed here.

Michael Hoffman, a former reporter for the New York bureau of the Associated Press, is the author of eight books of history and literature, including Judaism Discovered.

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Sunday, December 08, 2013

Our enemies and detractors among the rabbis and their allies insult the intelligence of the uninformed by deceitfully claiming that Hoffman’s "Talmud quotes only reflect a series of debates between rabbis," rather than serving as a law-making function within Judaism. In the course of attempting to forge a connection between the U.S. Constitution and the Babylonian Talmud which Thomas Jefferson mocked and despised, Benjamin Wittes of the “conservative” Brookings Institute writes the following nonsense:

"The Talmud is a series of debates—and commentaries on those debates—on a text called the Mishnah.”

The concept of a multiplicity of interpretations is not something we deny. Orthodox Judaism is a situation-ethics religion whose disposable “morality" has a shelf life according to the zeitgeist, as for example, Rambam’s injunctions on killing gentiles, heretics and Christians, depends on whether Judaics are in the ascendant in a particular era, or not. Judaism’s situation ethics revolve around relatively few fixed, non-negotiable sacred dogmas, such as the superiority of the “Jew,” the inferiority of the gentile, the filthiness of the female menstruant, the evil of Jesus Christ and His Mother, etc.

Rabbinic law, the halacha, is derived first from the Mishnah, then from the Gemara, and then from successor texts having canonical status. How this halacha comes to be formed and exert authority is a matter of exegetical rules pertaining to hermeneutic and epistemological boundaries and determinations which do not derogate any portion of the Talmud Bavli (Babylonian Talmud). Almost all of the Talmud Bavli at one time or another can be valid and authoritative, depending on the circumstances of the time.

In Erubin 13b we observe that the school of Hillel and the school of Shammai differed. These schools are depicted as disputing for three years over whose ruling constitutes the halacha. In this case, even though it was subsequently determined that the halacha was according to Hillel, it is written that both Shammai and Hillel represent the words of the living God. [Cf. Bar-Ilan University Prof. Avi Sagi, “Both are the Words of the Living God: A Typological Analysis of Halakhic Pluralism,” in Hebrew Union College Annual no. 65 (1995). Also cf. Prof. William “Zev" Kolbrenner, “Chiseled from All Sides: Hermeneutics and Dispute in Rabbinic Judaism,” Association for Jewish Studies Review, no. 28 (2004)].

Since both schools of rabbinic thought represent the word of God according to the authentic teaching of Orthodox Judaism, both represent the Torah sheBeal peh, the Oral “Torah" of the ancient Pharisees embodied by “Chazal," the Phraisaic and Talmudic “sages” who concocted the halacha. Viewed within the perspective of the rabbinic hermeneutic — which is so often denied in public — the exchanges between competing rabbinic views within the Talmud Bavli are 1. the basis of rabbinic law (halacha) and 2. have authority and validity even when in certain historical periods another view predominates. Therefore, when our opponents claim that the racist, demonic, anti-Christian, misogynist and insane statements from the Talmud should be dismissed as the mere flotsam of banal debates, they are lying, in the flagrant and familiar pattern that has come to be known as chutzpah.

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Saturday, November 30, 2013

To understand Roman Catholic Austrian Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, a scion of the Black Nobility and a product of the Joseph Ratzinger (future Pope Benedict XVI) school of theology, one must understand the extreme Left/Liberal Austrian milieu. For example, the pontificating Austrian Catholic bishops and cardinal were in favor of the government of Austria's imprisonment for more than a year of English historian David Irving, even as they pose as champions of civil liberties and human rights.

Furthermore, the Austrian Catholic Church in this century has a shameful track record of Orwellian re-writing of history to please not Christ but the rabbis who execrate him. After the ritual murder in Austria of a little Catholic child named Andreas of Rinn (Anderl von Rinn) by Judaics on a rock ("Judenstein"), a Catholic church was built around the rock. Andreas was later beatified. In 1985, under Pope John Paul II, the bones of the martyr were removed from the church and in 1994 veneration of the "Child of Judenstein" was officially banned by Austrian Bishop Reinhold Stecher [1921-2013] of Innsbruck.

"Especially, he (Bishop Stecher) wanted to make sure that we would visit the village of Rinn, where for a couple of hundred years the faithful had gathered to commemorate the martyrdom of a little boy who had supposedly been murdered by a group of Jews in the 15th century. The Anderle cult, as it was known, caused immeasurable pain to Jews in the region. Stecher considers it one of the major triumphs of his tenure as bishop that he was able to have this cult officially stopped and the anti-Jewish plaques in the chapel replaced by appropriate markers.” —Source.(An old postcard of the "Jew stone” can be seen here).

Austrian Catholicism is heavily influenced by its former leading position in the Holy Roman Empire, which in 1700 banned Johann Andreas Eisenmenger's Entdecktes Judenthum which, after the New Testament, is the most revealing volume ever written about Judaism (Entdecktes Judenthum was a book which the Austrian Adolf Hitler mysteriously ignored in favor of the promotion of the disputed and vastly inferior "Protocols").

Cardinal Schönborn served as Cardinal Archbishop of Vienna, Austria under Pope Benedict XVI, a pontiff described in the media as an arch-conservative.

Schönborn remains Cardinal Archbishop of Vienna under Pope Francis, a pontiff described in the media as an arch-liberal.

Last October Cardinal Schönborn was honored by B'nai B'rith, a Judaic masonic lodge charged with thought control and suppression of freedom of speech and inquiry.

Catholic Herald: "...Austrian Cardinal Christoph Schönborn is often described as a reformer who comes out of Pope Benedict’s intellectual tradition. Nicknamed the Zauberlehrling (“Sorcerer’s Apprentice”) he studied under Joseph Ratzinger (future Pope Benedict) in Regensburg and is an active member of the Ratzinger Schülerkreis, a group of the Pope’s former students who meet annually with the Holy Father to discuss theological issues. He was secretary of the body which put together the compendium of Catholic teaching in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, first published in the 1990s."

"...a Schönborn spokesperson told National Catholic Reporter Aug. 22 (2006) that '...all historians are of the opinion that Mozart was a Mason. There is much evidence for this,' Erich Leitenberger said. 'But at the same time it is necessary to understand that Freemasonry in the 18th century was a completely different thing from [that of] the 19th or 20th centuries. There was no problem to be a deeply convinced Catholic and a Mason at the same time, as is illustrated by the examples of many priests, abbots, etc. [who were Masons] in the late 18th century.' In other words, according to Leitenberger, Cardinal Schönborn’s position is that Mozart was a Mason, but he was fully Catholic too.”

From the blog of our colleague Maurice Pinay:

"Schönborn is a descendant of old nobility of the Holy Roman Empire known for its sheltering of usurers, rabbis, intelligencers and the Talmud itself (see: Judaism Discovered) and peddling of alcohol on credit via Judaic front-men to the poorest of Christian peasants.

"The Schönborn clan was made at Kazenelnbogen, coincidentally (or, rather, not), where the Katzenellenbogen rabbinic dynasty originates, whose descendants allegedly include the Rothschilds, Karl Marx, Rabbi Abraham Heschel, 'Messiah' Schneerson, among many others (see: The Unbroken Chainby Neil Rosenstein, himself allegedly a descendant of Katzenellenbogen..."

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New York Times Breast-Cancer Report Helps Trace the Origins of Fake "Jews"

By Michael Hoffman

Zionist publications such as the New York Times are usually exceedingly guarded when it comes to genetic studies demonstrating that so-called "Jews" are actually descended from the 8th century A.D. Turko-Mongolian "Khazar" nation of the east Caucasus region, rather than Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The Khazar nation comprised one of the largest medieval states in Eurasia. Dr. Eran Elhaik is a former Israeli soldier currently serving as a post-doctoral researcher in genetics at Johns Hopkins University. Elhaik earned a doctorate in molecular biology from the University of Houston. In December, 2012, the journal Genome Biology and Evolution published the 33-year-old Judaic scientist’s learned study, “The Missing Link of Jewish European Ancestry: Contrasting the Rhineland and the Khazarian Hypotheses,” in which Elhaik claims that the roots of the Ashkenazi “Jews” are in the Caucasus, not the Middle East.

Elhaik's genetic findings can be summarized in the following points: Khazars posing as Jews do not have a common Levantine ancestor. The Roman exile after the destruction of the Temple did not result in a "Jewish diaspora" in Europe. So-called "Ashkenazi Jews" did not originate from a small founder group. All Jews are not related to one another.

Proceeding from early findings in books such as Arthur Koesltler’s The Thirteenth Tribe and Paul Wexler’s The Ashkenazic Jews: A Slavo-Turkic People in Search of a Jewish Identity, scientists like Dr. Elhaik have traced the origins of most "Jews" in the West to a Turkic people who converted to Judaism in the eighth century, lived in the Eurasian state of Khazaria, and then migrated to Eastern Europe in the 12th and 13th centuries where gullible churchmen accepted them as the Jews, God's wayward but chosen people.

In Khazaria the word "Kagan" (also spelled Khagan) denoted ruler or emperor. Observe some of the fake "Jews" who rule over us and who have that moniker or prefix: Robert Kagan, neocon architect of the Iraq war (co-founder of the Project for the New American Century with William Kristol); Elena Kagan, Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court; Lazar Kaganovich, Bolshevik Commissar of the propaganda department of the Red Army, destroyer of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior and Secretary of the Moscow Branch of the Communist Party under Stalin; Rabbi Meir Kagan, Polish-born author of the Talmud-derived law book Mishnah Berurah that rules the lives of hundreds of thousands of Khazar adherents of Orthodox Judaism.

The Zionist-dominated American media typically surround pioneering scientific data like that of Dr. Elhaik with a plethora of extreme skepticism, conflicting reports and disputation from contrary sources, so as to sow doubts among those who might otherwise be willing to accept the data as credible. Such acceptance would completely undermine the Israeli justification for appropriating Palestinian land and extruding the indigenous population. It would also expose the diabolic bankruptcy of the doctrine of recent popes and Protestant Fundamentalists, which insinuate that having rejected Christ, Israelis will nevertheless be granted eternal life as a result of an "irrevocable covenant" based on their alleged carnal descent from the Biblical patriarchs.

In the case of the following New York Times article of Nov. 27, 2013, the propaganda mechanisms usually in place are absent. This is an unguarded study of hereditary breast cancer genes occurring among Khazar women who are identified as "Ashkenazi” (of course we sympathize with the Khazar ladies —and all women afflicted with breast cancer — and we advise that all married women have many children and breast feed them, because statistically, mothers of large, breast-fed families often have significantly lower rates of breast cancer).

No attempt has been made in this Times report on Ashkenazi breast cancer to explain how millions of so-called Jews occupying Palestinian land are shown in scientific and medical literature to have an east European rather than a Middle Eastern origin.

It is for this reason that we never call these people Jews. Instead we have coined the term "Judaics" to describe them, based on their religious/nationalist affiliation with or nostalgia for Talmudic Judaism and/or the folk culture of Yiddishkeit, the medieval ghetto, and the accompanying legends of tribal solidarity during persecution. An equally or even more appropriate term would simply be Khazar, but this word remains at present too opaque to be widely recognized as a synonym for those who say they are Jews and are not, although hopefully that will change in the near future.

Michael Hoffman is the author of Judaism's Strange Gods, and Judaism Discovered, and the introduction to Prof. Alexander McCaul's classic study, The Talmud Tested, reprinted this year by Independent History and Research.

Eran Elhaik’s 33-page scientific study is for sale from Independent History and Research for $12 in the U.S., $17 to Canada and $20 overseas, from Independent History and Research, Box 849, Coeur d’Alene, Idaho 83816. (Payable in US funds from a US bank. In the case of payment by Paypal add an additional 3.5% to the total). Caveat emptor: this is a technically dense research paper intended for geneticists. It is difficult reading for the average layman. Also a caution on the length: the 33 pages are widely-spaced so the content amounts to closer to fifteen typeset pages than 33].

KFAR SABA, Israel — Ever since she tested positive for a defective gene that causes breast cancer, Tamar Modiano has harbored a mother’s fear: that she had passed it on to her two daughters. Ms. Modiano had her breasts removed at 47 to prevent the disease and said that the day she found out her older daughter tested negative was one of the happiest of her life.

Now she wants her younger daughter, Hadas, 24, to be tested so she can start a family early if she is positive and then have a double mastectomy too. Ms. Modiano’s elder daughter, Suzi Gattegno, 29, disagrees.

“You’re keeping her from living her life,” Ms. Gattegno told her mother. “You want to marry her off early.”

“If she’s a carrier, she should marry early,” her mother countered.

Israel has one of the highest rates of breast cancer in the world. Mortality is very low, in part because of intense screening.

“She doesn’t even have a boyfriend,” the daughter said. “You need to stop pressuring her.”

“I want to protect her!” Ms. Modiano replied.

Such family debates are playing out across Israel these days. The country has one of the highest rates of breast cancer in the world, according to a World Health Organization report. And some leading scientists here are advocating what may be the first national screening campaign to test women for cancer-causing genetic mutations common among Jews — tests that are already forcing young women to make agonizing choices about what they want to know, when they want to know it and what to do with the information.

The so-called Jewish breast cancer genes have preoccupied women here for years, but after the actress Angelina Jolie revealed in May that she had undergone a double mastectomy because she had tested positive for such a mutation, coverage here exploded, with radio and TV talk shows featuring Israeli women grappling with similar decisions.

Jews of Ashkenazi, or central and eastern European, backgrounds, who make up about half the Jews in Israel and the vast majority of those in the United States, are much more likely to carry mutations that increase the risks for both breast and ovarian cancers, according to the National Cancer Institute.

A number of influential geneticists and cancer doctors from various medical centers here say that the Israeli Health Ministry should pay for free voluntary genetic testing of all Ashkenazi women over the age of 25. About a million women would be covered, at a cost of less than $100 per test. Jews of Iraqi descent, whose families also often carry a harmful mutation, might also be screened. The goal of a proposed universal screening program would be to identify an estimated 30,000 Israeli women who have the mutations.

So far, with sporadic testing, about 6,000 of them have been found, many only after a cancer diagnosis, said Dr. Ephrat Levy-Lahad, the coordinator of the Israel Genetics Consortium.

“That’s our target population,” said Dr. Oded Olsha, a breast surgeon at Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem. “If we can find them, we can save their lives.”

Women who tested positive for mutations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, which suppress tumors, would be strongly encouraged to complete child bearing by their late 30s so they could have their ovaries removed by age 40. Risk-reducing mastectomies would also be offered.

The profoundly controversial idea of broad-based screening has already set off debate in Israel among advocates for women and those in the medical and scientific fields. Critics say it may lead to social stigma and a rash of unnecessary operations, and also burden some women with information they may not want or know how to use.

The choice is not a simple one. Removing the breasts and ovaries sharply reduces the risk of cancer, but mastectomies are disfiguring and women often experience scarring and numbness after breast reconstruction. Loss of the ovaries plunges women into menopause, potentially leading to hot flashes, a reduced sex drive and heightened risks of heart disease and bone loss.

But already demand for genetic testing is very high here — there are yearlong waiting lists — and national health insurance generally covers it as long as a woman is referred by her doctor or a genetic counselor.

While poor countries struggle to provide even basic cancer care to women, wealthier societies like Israel and the United States are increasingly using sophisticated technologies to identify those at greatest risk in an effort to thwart the disease before it gets started. Several American Jewish organizations have recently undertaken a campaign to raise awareness about the genetic susceptibility to breast and ovarian cancer among Ashkenazi Jews.

The cancer divide here in Israel is more ethnic than economic. Will only Ashkenazi Jews be routinely tested? Though they are much more likely to carry one of the common harmful mutations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, Israel is a melting pot of both Arab citizens and Jews from all over the world, and only half of the country’s six million Jews are of Ashkenazi ancestry.

Under the proposal being put forward by some Israeli geneticists, it is likely that Israeli Arab citizens and Jews of Sephardic ancestry — whose families originate in North Africa and the Middle East — would not routinely be included among those screened for BRCA mutations, a point of contention in a country where a social and ethnic rift already divides Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews.

Families of Iraqi origin, like Ms. Modiano’s, may be covered because of their higher genetic risks. She always knew there was cancer in her father’s family. Three of his sisters died of breast cancer at young ages.

But she was tested for cancer-causing mutations only three years ago after finding out her relatives were being screened. The result stunned her. “I thought about what it meant for me, and then I thought, ‘What about my daughters?’ ” Ms. Modiano said recently, shuddering slightly. “I was petrified. I still am.”

Within three months, Ms. Modiano had a risk-reducing double mastectomy and an operation to remove her ovaries. But the decisions facing her daughters, both in their 20s, were far more complicated. Neither was married, and each had a 50 percent chance of carrying the mutation.

Ms. Gattegno, who was in nursing school at the time, decided to be tested. “I told my boyfriend that if I turned out to be a carrier, I would quit school for a while and we’d have kids right away,” she said. “And then I’d have a prophylactic mastectomy.”

Difficult Questions

At the Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem, Dr. Levy-Lahad, who started one of the first genetic testing programs in Israel, is among the main champions of universal screening for Ashkenazi women. She has worked closely with the American scientist who identified the BRCA1 gene, Mary-Claire King.

“If you’re only testing women after they’ve been affected, you’ve lost the game,” Dr. Levy-Lahad said. “Genetic testing is about prevention.”

She pointed to the risks. One in 40 Ashkenazi women carry a harmful genetic mutation, compared to less than one in 100 women generally.

Women with these mutations are four to five times more likely to develop aggressive breast cancers, according to the National Cancer Institute. The disease often comes at an early age and in both breasts, said Dr. Gad Rennert, the director of Israel’s National Cancer Control Center.

The potential for preventing ovarian cancer, a rarer but more lethal disease, is even greater. The common harmful mutations found in Ashkenazis are implicated in about 30 percent of ovarian cancers in Israeli women — and 40 percent or more of cases in women under 60, Dr. Rennert said.

Practical and ethical questions abound. Should men — who are just as likely to pass the mutations to their children and who are themselves at increased risk for some cancers — also be tested? Will ultra-Orthodox Jews participate in screening, knowing a positive test could hurt their family’s chances of making a good marriage match?

Identifying people as carriers can change their perceptions of themselves and the way they envision their futures, said Dr. Gail P. Jarvik, the head of the division of medical genetics at University of Washington Medical Center in Seattle.

Even though the testing would be voluntary, women could feel pressured to participate, said Barbara A. Koenig, a professor of medical anthropology and bioethics at the University of California, San Francisco. “When you institute mass screening, you’re making a collective decision that this is a good thing.”

There are also lingering scientific questions. While much is known about the three common Ashkenazi BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations, the risk they confer varies. Some families may have other genetic factors that modify their risk, which explains why some carriers never develop cancer while others die in their 20s.

Women identified as mutation carriers are showered with resources for early detection and prevention. These women’s risk for developing breast cancer ranges from 45 to 65 percent or higher, depending on family history, and their risk for ovarian cancer can be as high as 39 percent.

Routine mammography screening for most Israeli women starts at 50, but carriers are eligible for frequent clinical breast exams and expensive magnetic resonance imaging of the breast, all covered by national health insurance. They are also eligible for regular blood tests and vaginal ultrasounds to screen for ovarian cancer.

Cultural Obstacles

Many Israeli women who have the harmful mutations complain that male doctors display sexist attitudes about the importance of breasts and are loath to do mastectomies on healthy women.

Dr. Moshe Inbar, an outspoken oncologist in Tel Aviv who opposes preventive mastectomies, has said that a woman cannot have an orgasm after her breasts are removed, an assertion not supported by evidence.

“Would you like to live without your breasts?” Dr. Inbar, the director of the oncology division at Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, asked. “I try to dissuade women from doing this. Surgery is not something that should be done on patient demand; it should be done when indicated.”

While more than a third of American women carrying the harmful genetic mutations choose preventive mastectomies, only 4 percent of Israeli women do, according to a 2008 International Journal of Cancer study that compared risk-reducing procedures for samples of BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutation carriers in Canada, the United States, Israel and six European countries.

By contrast, well over half the carriers in all countries but Poland had their ovaries removed, a procedure that also reduces breast cancer risk.

But there are signs that attitudes are beginning to change here, as women take to the Internet to research their options, challenge the medical profession and shop for doctors.

Tamar Horesh, 35, a computer programmer from central Israel, has vivid memories of her mother’s painful death from ovarian cancer at 51.

When Ms. Horesh tested positive for a BRCA1 mutation, she said her husband supported her decision to surgically remove her ovaries and breasts. They had three young children to raise.

Finding a doctor to do it was another matter. “The first doctor I went to said I was insane, and he said, ‘If you have brain cancer, are you going to chop off your head?’ ” said Ms. Horesh. “The second doctor said that he noticed I had a small chest, and he thought I just wanted an excuse to have my breasts enlarged.”

A third doctor told her what many women hear, “Come back when you have cancer,” and “Nobody dies of breast cancer nowadays.”

In fact, some 900 Israeli women die of breast cancer each year, according to the Israel Cancer Association.

Ms. Horesh eventually got referrals from Bracha, a group founded to raise awareness by Lisa Cohen, who has a BRCA mutation.

Ms. Cohen’s mother died of cancer at 49, and then her sister, who had four young children, died at 36. “I felt like I was going to be next in line,” said Ms. Cohen, a divorced mother of three who was determined to stay alive for her children.

A Personal Decision

Hadas Modiano, a university student in Jerusalem, is waiting a couple of years before she seriously considers being tested as her mother insists. But her mother’s example has given her strength.

“I think I’m not as scared as I might have been because I saw what my mother went through,” she said. “It was hard, but she has managed and overcome.”

But for many women, the choices are harrowing. A Tel Aviv lawyer, 43, who asked that her name not be used to protect her privacy, was devastated when she found out at 26 that she had one of the bad mutations.

The lawyer, who was only 4 when her mother died of breast cancer, said she was among the first to line up for the genetic test when it became available in Israel in the 1990s.

“You may think you’re prepared for this information, but you aren’t,” she said. “My blood went cold when I found out.” Afterward, she said she realized, “The only solutions are so radical — amputating parts of your body.”

When she first met the man who became her husband, she told him that she could never marry or have children. He convinced her otherwise. She goes for frequent scans and checkups but postponed having a mastectomy so she could breast-feed their children.

She chose to become pregnant through in vitro fertilization so female embryos that did not carry harmful mutations could be selected in the lab.

“Finally, there was something positive to do with the information,” she said.
Preventive surgeries are not always successful. Tali Shalev had what was supposed to be a preventive double mastectomy, but pathologists found a cancerous lesion in the removed breast tissue. “I’m an example of someone who did everything possible,” said Ms. Shalev, 40, who has three children.

The dilemmas of genetic testing are compounded in the ultra-Orthodox community, where the emphasis on modesty often dampens open discussion.

Still, Tziporah, 38, a Canadian-born Orthodox mother of seven who now lives in Israel, talks openly about her experience because she wants to reach other religious women. Tziporah, who goes by her nickname, Tzippy, asked that her last name not be used to protect the privacy of her extended family members, who also may carry the gene. Her mother died of breast cancer at 42, when she was 5, and when Tzippy was pregnant with her last child a few years ago, she tested positive for a BRCA1 mutation.

She sought advice from several rabbis about whether she should go forward with risk-reducing surgeries. They reassured her that preserving life is one of the supreme values of Judaism.

So three years ago, after her youngest child was born, she had her breasts and ovaries removed. The operations were grueling, but she said she wanted to make sure her children would not suffer the same loss she had. And she said she felt she had a mission to encourage other women to be tested.

Wednesday, November 27, 2013

On Nov. 24 Pope Francis issued an "Apostolic Exhortation." Two sections in the 50,000 word-document are of interest. One is centered on the Money Power, but Francis, like all his predecessors since the Renaissance, merely issues a lot of hot air and toothless semantics. The empty rhetoric will mollify some activists no doubt, but it will do little or nothing to curb the power of the corporate-financier elite or the bought-and-paid for churchmen who have been serving them since the days of the Medici. The only way to curb the Money Power is to restore the infallible doctrine that charging interest on loans of money is a mortal sin and absolution for this sin of theft requires restitution in the form of a return of the ill-gotten gains. Then the Overlords of the Cryptocracy would howl and then Francis would feel their wrath, rather than their adulation.

The "Apostolic Exhortation" also contains a section on Judaism, rendering it immune to missionary activity, which is the non-negotiable demand of the rabbis to which Rome has submitted, as promulgated by Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Hence, there’s nothing particularly new from Francis here, though his post-Vatican II colleagues presented this revolutionary distortion of St. Paul with far more guile and sophistication, whereas Francis blurts it out without much theological embroidery:

247. "We hold the Jewish people in special regard because their covenant with God has never been revoked, for “the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable” (Rom 11:29). The Church, which shares with Jews an important part of the sacred Scriptures, looks upon the people of the covenant and their faith as one of the sacred roots of her own Christian identity (cf. Rom 11:16-18). As Christians, we cannot consider Judaism as a foreign religion; nor do we include the Jews among those called to turn from idols and to serve the true God (cf. 1 Thes 1:9)." [Source: Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium of the Holy Father Francis to the Bishops, Clergy, Consecrated Persons and the Lay Faithful on The Proclamation of the Gospel in Today's World].

The historic Church never taught this distortion of Romans 11:29, though it is a fixture of the theology of the soon-to-be-saint John Paul II and the supposedly arch-conservative counter-pope to Francis, Benedict XVI. JP II and Benedict were firmly in the Talmudic/rabbinic camp and Francis is no different. Twisting Romans chapter 11 into a saved-by-race pledge of eternal security is about as anti-Christ as it gets. If the Jews of first century Palestine had an irrevocable covenant with God, why would the Son of God have bothered to incarnate on earth and be crucified for their sake?

Jesus declared to the Jewish Pharisees, whose ideological descendants today are the rabbis of Orthodox Judaism: “If you were Abraham’s children, you would be doing the works Abraham did, but now you seek to kill me, a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God.” (John 8:39-40).

Why didn’t Jesus speak as the popes of Rome do, and acknowledge the Pharisees on the basis of their flesh, and their racial prestige? Jesus rejected the doctrine of salvation by race. He taught that the children of Abraham are those who do the works of Abraham.

By Our Lord’s definition, the spiritual heirs of those who have built a religion on the refusal to accept Jesus as the Messiah of Israel, are most certainly not the children of Abraham. The modern popes are guilty of contradicting Christ. They obstinately continue to disseminate the same error as the Pharisees, that the racial prestige of “Jews,” whether of the first or the twenty-first century, is sufficient to qualify them as heirs of the promises which God made to Abraham in Genesis 12:3.

John the Baptist, the greatest of the prophets (Luke 7: 26-28), declared to the Jews: “Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father,’ for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children for Abraham. Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees. Every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.” (Matthew 3: 9-10).

“Who is the liar but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the antichrist, he who denies the Father and the Son. No one who denies the Son has the Father. Whoever confesses the Son has the Father also.” (1 John 2:22-23).

Why are so many persons strongly deluded into believing that those who deny Jesus Christ, are somehow Abraham’s children? Because: "...they refused to love the truth and so be saved. Therefore God sends them a strong delusion, so that they may believe what is false, in order that all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness.” (2 Thessalonians 2:10-12).

Bob Burrdige writes, "In the time between Abraham and Jesus, the tree was the nation of the Jews. In the time after Jesus, the tree is the Apostolic church, God’s Spiritual Israel (see Romans 9:6). As the elect from all nations are evangelized and brought in, the tree grows toward fulness. As the apostate and unbelieving are removed, the tree improves in purity. It is in this way that all of God’s true Israel will be saved. The New Testament Church does not replace Israel. The Church is Israel in her completed form."

This was the infallible official teaching of the Church until the coming of Popes Paul VI, John Paul II, Benedict XVI and the now rather uncouth Francis, who is not quite as adept at accompanying the betrayal of the Gospel with high-falutin' theological dissembling, and therefore the hellish papal doctrine of Jew-worship is more obvious in his pontificate than in previous ones that had undeserved reputations for "conservatism."

We have saved the most flagrant papal lie for last. In Evangelii Gaudium Francis exhorts: "...we cannot...include the Jews among those called to turn from idols and to serve the true God."

Pope Francis insists that the "Jews" do not follow idols and have not rejected the true God. Really? What did we just read in 1 John 2: 22-23? What are the words out of the mouth of Jesus Himself in John 8: 39-40? And from John the Baptist in Matthew 3: 9-10? All of those Scriptures have to be abolished or explained away in order to claim that contemporary “Jews” are not engaged in idolatry. Moreover, the rabbis are witnesses against themselves in this matter of idolatry:

"Since God already gave the Torah to the Jewish people on Mt. Sinai we no longer pay attention to heavenly voices. God must submit to the decisions of a majority vote of the rabbis.” —Babylonian Talmud, Bava Metzia 59b.

Let's see now, the rabbinic halacha declares that Judaics no longer pay attention to heaven and that God must submit to them, and the pope of Rome declares that Judaism gives service to the true God and is not engaged in idolatry.

The only people who could possibly fall for this risible papal bunkum are those who want to be deceived, who "take pleasure in unrighteousness" and who "refuse to love the truth and be saved."

Every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.

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